The only reason to order room service when at the Priory is that the restaurant is fully booked (and it may be). The room-service food is all the same, but served with a bit more bother, and because the menu changes so often, they will have to send someone up to you with a list of dishes to choose from; and these will then be served in courses, in the same leisurely manner as though you were dining downstairs. So there is no reason not to take advantage of the comfort and beauty of the restaurant.

The menu changes every couple of days, so it would be fruitless for me to recommend particular dishes. Fruitless, also, because nothing I had there was less than stunning and I am convinced it would be impossible to choose wrong. From the restaurant tasting menu I had a translucent white fish, raw as sashimi, paved with coins of truffle; langoustines and foie gras on a bed of leek sauce; lamb, thin sliced and served on a tomato confit with sliced artichoke hearts, and something in the sauce — cumin, perhaps — that gave it an eastern accent; a tart of ragged, flavorful little wild strawberries with basil and balsamic sorbet. On another occasion: tuna seared and served with caper berries and light fresh vegetables; a wood pigeon cut in six pieces, with apricot sauce and sliced apricots, and little bundles of spinach and herbs made up in the shape of wrapped toffees. Bread is plentiful and served with olive oil rather than butter, in Provence fashion, a new bottle of olive oil at every table.

The sensibility in fact is like the sensibility of the hotel decorations: the dishes are both surprising and disciplined, nothing done merely to startle, nothing merely a matter of course. A marked sense of balance.

This is not to say that tradition has no place. For the cheese course there is a rolling cart, like a dessert cart but topped with a slab of salmon-colored marble; and on this slab are arrayed dozens and dozens of cheeses. The waiter points out the three categories with his knife: “Chevre, vache, brebis.” Goat, cow, and sheep. If you let him, he will make selections for you and they will be delicious; but you need not, if your wits are fast enough to let you choose. The cheeses are laid out for you on a square of black slate.

(At the next table from me were four people, an American couple and an Australian couple. When the cheese course came, they said they couldn’t possibly and anyway they weren’t crazy about French cheese. “Maybe a little goat?” asked the waiter, looking surprised and sad. “NO!” chorused the philistines. My heart ached for the refused cheese. I would gladly have taken home their portions in a bag.)

Breakfast is laid out in the indoor part of the restaurant as well, a buffet — but not the kind of hotel breakfast buffet one usually encounters, where there is grotesquely too much of everything and the contents grow stale over the morning. Here are softly furred bells of chevre, just the size and shape of the bells on a Christmas tree; hard yellow cow cheese in sticks; ham in slivers; a silver display with three tiers, on which are apples and pears posing for a still-life. Croissants have their own basket. As soon as anything is depleted it is replaced, so that the quantities remain picturesquely correct all morning. Women come down in long traveling dresses and pretty jeweled sandals, men in breezy trousers.

If it all sounds too obnoxiously perfect, I have two more things to add.

First, at dinner I saw a man at another table ask for a packet of medicinal powder to be mixed up with ice and milk and served with his meal. This sounded a horrible thing to do to a lovely meal, but the waiter took the powder away without a blink, and returned from the bar a few moments later with something that looked like a coconut daiquiri in a great cold bulbous glass.

Second: they did not charge me for my wine, and I did not realize until the next day (by the end of the meal I was in a pleasant coma). I went to the reception desk to point out the error and offer to pay for it belatedly. I was not entirely surprised when they refused to charge me for it after the fact. But I was touched that they sent up to my room at turndown time a handwritten note of thanks from the manager. It is as graceful as everything else about the hotel, and I mean to keep it.